Robert Earle Martin

Robert Earle Martin, youngest of the two children of Elias Martin and Lavina Watson, was born 6 July 1884 in Winslow, Stephenson County, IL. He was known by his middle name in daily life, though his “real” first name appears on the majority of public records. The name Earle was often rendered as Earl in various records but Earle appears to be the correct form inasmuch as he signed his World War I draft card as Robert Earle Martin.

The farm where he spent his early childhood was just over the state line from Martintown, Green County, WI, consisting of eighty acres his father had received as a gift from his father, Nathaniel Martin, upon reaching his majority and founding a household. One could say therefore say Earle was more correctly a resident of Martintown than Winslow, and he attended Martin elementary school along with many of his cousins. When Earle was six or seven years old, his father caught gold fever and left for Colorado, spending the rest of his life there as a miner. Elias never again resided in the Winslow/Martintown area, leaving Lavina to continue on essentially as a single mother. The couple do not appear to have ever formally divorced. Elias was successful at mining and must have contributed some sort of monetary child support. Nevertheless, he was not there to mentor his son into adulthood. Earle consequently learned to be independent at a tender age.

Within a short time after Elias’s departure, if not earlier, Lavina moved off the farm near Martintown and took possession of a home a mile south within the actual village of Winslow. This was where Earle spent the middle period of his childhood. He left home early, though. The 1900 census reveals that at age fifteen, he was getting by as a servant on the Cadiz Township, Green County farm owned by Clinton and Daisy Swartz. The latter couple do not appear to have been relatives, but their farm was smack dab in the midst of properties that belonged, or had belonged, to Lavina’s kinfolk, her people having made up a large number of the original settlers of Cadiz Township. Located nearby was the farm of grandfather Thomas Watson, where Earle’s older sister Blanche was residing while working as a school teacher. Lavina was on her own in Winslow. Despite the unsettled youth, Earle did manage to finish high school, unlike some males of his generation. (Note: Winslow High in that era was only a two-year institution.)

What Earle occupied his life with during the first two decades of the Twentieth Century is not completely clear, except that he served in the U.S. Navy during some part of that interval. He may be the Robert E. Martin of the right age and birthplace who appears in the 1910 census as one of the sailors based at the Mare Island shipyard in Vallejo, Solano County, CA. Later in the 1910s he may have spent an interval with his father in Colorado. By the second half of the decade, i.e. when he was in his early thirties, he settled in Champaign County, IL. This was where his sister Blanche and brother-in-law, Dr. John Bruner Colwell, were residing, John having established a “country doctor” practice based out of Foosland, a small community in the northwest corner of the county. The Colwells arrived in late 1911 or early 1912; just when Earle showed up is not known, except that he was there by 1918. His World War I draft registration card, filed 12 September 1918, places him as a resident of Dewey, Champaign County, IL. (Blanche is listed as his next-of-kin with her Foosland address.) Earle’s occupation is described as manager of Dewey General Merchandise, and his employer as the J.M. Jones Company.

Only a few months after that registration, Earle married local girl Magdlen Pauline Gilmore, daughter of Charles Holland Gilmore and Sarah Jane Rome, born 10 November 1895. (In her case, Magdlen is the correct form of her name, even though the standard spellings are Magdalen and Magdalene, both with an “a” in the middle.) The wedding took place 6 January 1919 in Champaign County. The couple dwelled at first with her parents on their farm just outside the city of Champaign. Earle’s occupation in the 1920 census, while part of that household, is listed as farmer.

Blanche Martin Colwell died in October, 1919 of post-surgical complications. She survived long enough to welcome Magdlen into the family as her sister-in-law, but did not live to see either of Earle’s offspring born. Earle and Magdlen’s first child, Robert Charles Martin, was born 9 February 1920. Blanche did have the joy of knowing the baby was on the way.

Earle gave up farming at some point, perhaps as late as 1929 when the Great Depression caused huge numbers of heartland farms to fail. The 1930 census shows that Earle was at that time an automobile salesman. He and Magdlen were then living within the city of Champaign. They had taken in a twenty-two-year-old roomer, Dorothy Wallace, perhaps in order to make ends meet in those trying economic times.

In the early 1930s, Earle and Magdlen split up, doing so about the time of the pregnancy that resulted in the birth of another son, John Eugene Martin. The cause of the break-up is not definitively known, but the timing and Earle’s subsequent behavior imply he was stunned and outraged to discover that the baby was not his -- stunned and outraged enough to do what no father should do, and abandon his other son, Robert, who without question was his. (The evidence includes the fact that the DNA of Robert’s descendants matches the DNA of other descendants of Nathaniel Martin and Hannah Strader.) A formal divorce followed.

In leaving Magdlen and the boys (shown at right in an image taken in the mid-1930s, after the divorce), Earle was repeating the pattern of his father. Elias was about the same age when he left Lavina. However, Elias and Lavina did make at least some token effort at maintaining contact, and Elias seems to have continued to support Lavina financially throughout her life. By contrast, the schism between Earle and Magdlen was profound. The depth of the bad feelings is exemplified by Robert Charles Martin’s obituary, which specifically mentions his mother was Magdlen Gilmore, but makes no reference to Earle. Robert’s eldest son reported in 2008 that as far as he had ever heard, Earle never saw his wife and offspring even once after his departure.

When Earle left Champaign, he at first went back to Green County. His mother was dead, but his rock-steady aunt Viola Watson Smith was still in place to offer a sanctuary. Viola and her husband William Smith were close friends and neighbors of the Martin clan -- so closely associated, in fact, that their only son, Glen, who had died in 1889 at three years of age, was among the handful of non-Martins ever to be buried in the Martin family graveyard. Another anchor was his first cousin Flossie Bast, Viola’s daughter. Flossie would go on to be Earle’s point-of-contact in Green County, and served as a conduit for news of him to his relatives -- even, on infrequent occasions, to Madglen and the boys. Not that there was often news. Earle wanted to put his past behind him. When his father died in March of 1932, Earle left his aunt’s house to proceed to Boulder, CO to take care of burial arrangements. Once there, he made Boulder his new home, remaining for at least three years. From the Martin clan’s viewpoint, it was almost as if he had dropped off the face of the earth.

Earle soon met the woman who was to become his second wife. She was Elva Mae Collins, a hospital nurse who had come to Boulder in the late 1920s along with her first husband, Carl W. Todd, who had gone on to die in 1929. Elva was part of a huge family. Her mother had given birth to fourteen children, nine with first husband Conrad Bazer and five more with John Benjamin Collins. Elva and her twin brother Alvin were the youngest of the fourteen. Elva had been born 7 November 1896 in Barrett, Marshall County, KS and had been raised mostly in Cass County, IA. At age 24, she had graduated from Jennie Edmundson Memorial Hospital Association of Nurses. Her choice to be a professional woman, and her subsequent lack of any children despite multiple marriages, suggests she may have been unable to have children. This may have been an unintended side effect of emergency abdominal surgery at age sixteen to remove her appendix. (In 1913, surgery was such a newfangled and primitive discipline it often led to complications.)

Earle and Elva's marriage certificate has not turned up yet, but the marriage license application has. That document shows the pair applied for their license 14 September 1936 in Yuma, AZ. They may have wed the same day and in the same place; if not, the wedding soon occurred. The application describes Earle as a resident of Los Angeles, CA while Elva was still at her Boulder address. A number of other sources confirm Earle moved to L.A. in either the latter part of 1935 or the early part of 1936. The application suggests it was the summer of the latter year, and that he did not want, in saying good-by to Boulder, to also say good-by to Elva. She in turn was willing to relocate in order to be his wife. That suggests how deeply they were smitten with one another, and yet the marriage would not last long. A 1937 directory for the city of Alhambra, Los Angeles County, CA lists the two together, but that is the last source that does so. The 1940 census shows him in L.A. as a hospital janitor renting a room from an elderly co-worker, Joseph Sumek, and Joseph’s wife Louise. Elva appears on her own in Pasadena, employed as a nurse for private family.

Earle lingered in the L.A. area until his death, which came in Hollywood, Los Angeles County, CA 13 April 1942. He was buried in Forest Lawn Cemetery the following Wednesday. He was survived back in Champaign by Madglen and his sons, as well as by brother-in-law John Colwell. (It was John’s foster daughter Velda Budd Routh who provided the photograph of Madglen and the boys shown on this webpage.) Magdlen never remarried. She lasted well into her seventies, passing away 11 May 1970 in Champaign.

Elva Collins was a widow by the time she wed again, and that allows the possibility that she and Earle never did get around to formally divorcing one another. They are still categorized as Married in the 1940 census even though they were living apart, and no source confirms a divorce. Her final husband was Ross Dwight Phillips (1896-1977), whom she wed 12 June 1942 in Los Angeles. Other than giving her the last name Phillips, which she used for the remaining thirty-one years of her life, he does not appear to have made much of a mark upon her life. They were together for a fraction of a decade, perhaps not even a full year. Elva supported herself as a nurse until retirement. In the 1950s, she worked at Huntington Hospital. That represents a genealogical coincidence. Earle’s uncle Jacob Sylvester Hodge -- husband of Jennie Edith Martin -- had founded that hospital (Pasadena’s first hospital) in the 1890s. (It did not acquire the name Huntington Hospital until after his tenure.) Elva passed away 29 January 1973. Though she died in Pasadena, her remains were buried back in Boulder with those of first husband Carl W. Todd.

Note: Earle is one of the few members of the family profiled on this website for whom there is no photograph. Unfortunately none has turned up in the surviving photos passed down by his cousins, and due to his divorce from Magdlen, none seem to have been kept by his descendants. There may be one exception. Earle may be one of the schoolchildren shown in the photo of the Martin School pupils of the mid-1890s, shown on the page of this website devoted to images of Martintown. (Click here to go straight to that page.) Alas, it is uncertain which of the children he is. There are several boys of the right approximate age in that image. And it is quite possible he is not in the group at all, because his home may have already been in the village of Winslow by that point, in which case he would no longer have been attending Martin School.

Children of Robert Earle Martin with Magdlen Pauline Gilmore

Robert Charles Martin

John Eugene Martin

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